


Five Times Richie Said 'Fuck You' (And One Time He Didn't)

by BoWritesShit



Series: Deer In Deadlights [1]
Category: IT (Movies - Muschietti), IT - Stephen King
Genre: Canon-Typical Horror, Canon-Typical Hypochondria, Canon-Typical Your Mom Jokes, IT: Chapter 2 - Freeform, M/M, Parasite mention, Reddie, Richie Tozier is a Mess, Richie's Facial Hair is Unacceptable, Sleep Deprivation, So Is His Wardrobe, There is a part two by demand, Time Skips, Too many movie references to list, anxiety disorders
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-24
Updated: 2019-11-24
Packaged: 2021-02-26 06:20:19
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,302
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21538888
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BoWritesShit/pseuds/BoWritesShit
Summary: This is a love story.This is not a love story.It depends on where you stop.
Relationships: Eddie Kaspbrak/Richie Tozier
Series: Deer In Deadlights [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1553887
Comments: 89
Kudos: 252





	Five Times Richie Said 'Fuck You' (And One Time He Didn't)

Everything was too bright and the inside of his head didn't feel like his own anymore, but he felt like he'd been here before. 

He felt like he'd been everywhere before, somehow.

"Fuck you!"

It was the first thing Eddie heard. He'd been semi-conscious for moments at a time before, trying to lift his head and finding it impossible, his hands groping uselessly at the air on the way to his face, missing by miles - and it really _did_ seem like everything was miles away, like his fingers would need to catch a red-eye just to make it to his head. He pawed at the tubes a few times, not caring which one, just trying to get any of them away from him - he didn't want them down his throat and up his nose and in his dick, he didn't know where those tubes had been. What if his throat tube had been someone's dick tube? Was that a thing? What if he had someone's dick problems in his throat now, but he wouldn't have any way of knowing? What if he spent the rest of his life with a case of dick-throat and they didn't find out until he died? What if they put that in his obituary?

Eddie Kaspbrak: he had dick-throat, he died like that, it was gross.

 _That isn't a thing_ , he told himself, and then it seemed like someone was pushing his head back down to the pillows, pushing his hands back down to the sheets, and then he was groggy and cold was flooding up his arm and into his chest and spreading through him and he was gone again, and again, and again.

The first time he was conscious, _really there_ , there were no tubes anymore, but every time he swallowed, the inside of his throat and his sinuses felt raw and flaming hot and scratchy, he could taste bile at the back of his paper-dry tongue, his mouth was cracked and painful. He mourned the money wasted on countless lip scrubs to avoid this kind of thing - he had seen a baby with a lip callus three years ago and hadn't stopped exfoliating his mouth ever since, it didn't matter that it was impossible for him to get one unless he was bottle feeding, he just liked to know that he was doing something about the theoretical possibility. His anxiety couldn't insist he had one if he was already treating himself for it.

"Fuck you!"

He opened his eyes and Richie stood at the end of his bed, clutching the foot board with a gleam in his eyes that made him look a little wild, a little psychotic, almost rabid, and for a moment it seemed like he might climb up the bed and actually punch him in the face, but he wasn't too worried about the possibility, because he had seen Richie's swing before.

"Fuck you." Richie repeated; the tone was different this time and Eddie couldn't work out what it meant - it sounded desperate, almost plaintive, but it was angry as well, all mixed in with efforts to make himself sound casual; Eddie was just staring at him from the hospital bed, too stoned and confused to manage anything but the occasional sticky-eyed blink.

"Eddie?"

The voice came from his left and he was staring at Bev; she put her hands over her mouth in surprise because he was really awake this time, and then there were hands on him, arms around him, bodies crushing in to touch him and hold him and he was croaking and confused, surrounded by litanies of joy, and the smell of Ben's expensive cologne and Mike's cheap aftershave, and Richie was gone, walking down the hall with his face in his hands, and Eddie didn't understand.

"My dick hurts." he said finally, and everyone awkwardly cleared away.

* * *

"I can't." Eddie croaked.

"Hey, fuck you." Richie said; he was crouching in front of Eddie but it wasn't a full crouch, it was some kind of half-crouch, like he'd forgotten what he was doing mid-way through a squat, even though he was sure Richie had never intentionally done a squat in his life. His gangly mantis body was contorted in on itself and Eddie wanted to tell him to straighten up, that rolling his shoulders forward like that was going to fuck up his spine, but he was genetically incapable of taking good advice, "Do it."

"Seriously man, I can't." Eddie repeated, his fingers clenching and unclenching on the hard plastic curves of the walker handles; the metal support sat in front of him and he was sitting on the side of the hospital bed with his legs shaking so hard that he knew it was going to be pointless to even try, "Look at my legs."

"Yeah, I saw them, they're dolphin-smooth, if you were covered from the knees up, I might get kind of turned on by your milky consumptive pallor - get up." Richie repeated; he was wearing a tropical shirt comprised of a yellow back drop and covered in a repeating pattern of women in bikinis. It made Eddie want to ask for a valium.

"I don't have tuberculosis." Eddie said, his tone serious and chastising, as though Richie might have believed he did, "And I choose to wax them."

"What." Richie said, just like that, with a period at the end; he stared at Eddie as though he had just been given the most perfect gift in the world, cradling the information like it was a precious newborn. Eddie Spaghetti waxed his noodles.

Richie sat with an expression that was a hell blend of horror and delight as it occurred to him that Eddie probably didn't stop at his legs; he was going to need his own hospital bed in a moment.

"I wax them, okay? I like them waxed, I like my legs smooth, it feels nice, it feels better when I jog, and if you say one more thing about my smooth legs, I'm gonna shove them both up your ass and do the splits." Eddie spat out.

"Ho-ho-holy shit." Richie said, laughing like a goblin.

"Stop laughing." Eddie said quickly, "I can't do this, okay? I can't, I'm shaking, they're not gonna hold me up, this isn't gonna happen, I'm gonna try to stand and my spine is going to break in half and I'll get an antibiotic-resistant infection and end up with an ulcer the size of a sinkhole in my back."

"Then I'll throw coins into it and make the wish to fuck your mother one last time," Richie said, finally straightening up, moving beside him, grabbing his arm, "You can, you just gotta -"

"Don't talk about my mother - hey -" Eddie said, jerking to get away, "Hey, stop,"

"All you gotta do," Richie was saying.

"Hands off, hands off," Eddie chanted, slapping him on the ribs, the arms, the shoulders - pat, pat, pat - swats that were annoying and stinging, getting Richie anywhere he could reach.

"Just put your weight on -"

"Tozier, I'm gonna choke you with my I.V - I'm gonna choke you -"

"Fucking lean forward so you can -" Richie said, getting slapped in the ear.

"How about you lean forward," Eddie said, his hospital gown half-off his shoulder, Richie's hair in his face and he was trying to get it out of his mouth, spitting like a viper and almost inhaling one of the curls.

"Stubborn motherfucker, just fucking stop slapping, stop slapping, fuck!" Richie said, flailing his arms until ceasefire and Eddie sat with his jaw jutted forward, mulish protest that transformed suddenly into wide-eyed confusion as Richie grabbed him by the jaw. It was the first time he had really put Tozier's size into perspective; now that his hands were on him, he was aware that his fingers spanned his face, that at some point they had grown up.

He stared through the frame of Richie's hands, chin cradled by his thumbs, locking eyes with him and he momentarily felt hypnotized, as though he couldn't have moved if he had wanted to because the intensity in the other man's gaze was keeping him pinned in place. He had never thought Richie could look that way before, that he could look at him that way before, and it made his chest ache so fiercely that he started to think he needed his inhaler.

"I know it hurts and it's fucking hard, okay?" Richie asked, nodding his head once, "Okay?"

Eddie nodded.

"But you're Eddie Kaspbrak, and you died twice last month," Richie said, "Most guys stop at one, but you went above and beyond amigo, you died twice last month and still opened your eyes this morning. You got this fucking far, you can stand up, you can do this. Okay? You can do hard things."

It was a sign of how serious Richie was that he didn't follow it up by pointing both hands at his crotch and saying 'speaking of hard things'. Eddie finally nodded, then nodded again, then once more just to make sure Richie understood him and they finally broke contact before Eddie said:

"If It was still alive, my nightmares would all manifest in the shirt you're wearing right now."

Richie looked down at his shirt as though he had never seen it before.

* * *

"I can't have that." Eddie said. He was still staring at the duffel bag on the ground, doing some mental calculations: it was the only thing that Richie had brought with him, which meant he'd been living from the equivalent of a bug-out bag for the last five weeks. On top of that, he had just pulled a handful of mini bottles from it, which meant that some of the space in that small bag had been dedicated solely to liquor - if that wasn't a summary of who Richie Tozier was as a person, he didn't know what was.

Richie shrugged and wordlessly downed an airplane bottle of straight vodka and for a moment it seemed like he was going to do it without flinching, but after he swallowed, a full body shiver went through him. It was only then that Eddie realized exactly how rough Richie looked, like some kind of film had suddenly been removed from his vision and he could see the bags under his eyes and how much he had let his hair grow out, his usual five o'clock shadow traded in for a midnight one, the beginnings of a full beard. He was disheveled and his usual vibrating energy was absent, his posture somehow both lax and tense at the same time.

It was the first time that he had ever seen Richie look fragile.

"Did you bring one bag because you didn't plan to stay long or because you thought you were going to die here?"

It felt like someone else had asked the question and Eddie glanced around himself as though to make sure it had been him after all, then he looked back to Richie and found him staring at the ground, his wrists on his knees and his long fingers curled in towards his palms.

"Richie?" Eddie asked, studying his profile, seeing the way his chin shivered, then realizing he had to do something about it, so he said, "You look like a hobo."

"Hey, fuck you." he said, relieved to be excused from the question, jolted from his shaking thoughts, cracking open another mini bottle, taking a moment to get his head on straight again.

"Give me the tequila." Eddie said finally, putting a hand out.

* * *

"You need to shave." Eddie said; his foot was in Richie's lap and the other man was lacing his shoe for him, the last of the movements he couldn't quite manage because his healing body wasn't prepared to give him that much freedom just yet, restricting him to having to lay down to get his pants on - which he was doing by himself now, thank you.

"I'm on vacation." Richie said; he had sunglasses on because he had gotten intensely drunk in his hotel room the previous night on account of the fact it was otherwise impossible for him to sleep in that fucking hotel, which was the only fucking hotel in Derry.

"You look like Charles Manson." Eddie said, and he twitched his foot forward to shove Richie in the chest, so Richie slapped his shin.

"Wanna hear my Charles Manson impression?"

"I really don't." Eddie said, "I want you to shave."

"You just want to take my power, you hussy."

"What?"

"Like Sampson."

"No, I know, I just didn't know you ever read anything before, like in your life."

"And I still got better grades than you." Richie said, and scratched somewhere in his beard, causing Eddie to cringe.

"Seriously, I will pay you." Eddie said, "I will pay you to get rid of it. How much do you want?"

Richie pushed up the leg of Eddie's pants, leaned forward, and rubbed his facial hair on his smooth leg.

"Oh my god, no!" Eddie yelled, instinctively kicking so hard that Richie's chair tilted backwards, sending Tozier to the ground, his long legs in the air; Eddie put his hands on his mouth, "Holy shit!"

"Holy shit!" Richie agreed from the ground, "What the fuck, how many lunges have you been doing?"

"I read you can get blood clots from too much sitting!" Eddie said, and he wanted to offer a hand but he imagined his arm ripping out of his body and his healing muscles tearing apart and his spine opening up like a zipper, so he just stood over him and craned his neck and poked him with his foot and yelled, "Are you fine?"

"Fuck you." Richie said and achingly got up from the ground, a tumbleweed of limbs using the wall to get awkwardly to his feet. Sometimes it was like Richie physically malfunctioned, as though there were too many parts for his brain to command at once so he could only move a joint at a time, as though he had to unfold his way from the floor.

"Sorry." Eddie said, "But your beard is disgusting."

"It's not that bad." Richie said, but there was something legitimately self-conscious in his response now that they were in front of each other, now that Eddie was standing on his own and dressed and had colour back in his skin, now that it was no longer touch and go, now that he was up and breathing with his own lungs instead of a machine and his stomach was stitched back together. He was self-conscious in a way he hadn't been for most of his life, in a way he had only experienced in Derry and now it was happening again and he felt joyous and sick all at once because Eddie Kaspbrak was alive.

The man he was in l -

"It looks like -" Eddie began, and then Richie vomited on him.

Richie only threw up when he was scared.

When Eddie stopped freaking out, they both blamed it on the hangover.

* * *

When a nurse wheeled him to the front doors for the last time, Eddie used the arms of the chair to stand himself up and walked unsurely to the front drive, staring grimly out at a city that had haunted him for twenty-seven years. He had been there for just a little under two months and now that he was out of the embrace of the hospital, the reminder caused a hollow cold pocket in his chest, like something had been left in there and he scratched unconsciously at his scar.

He smelled smoke and looked over just in time to watch Richie butt out his cigarette and come his way, his eyes traveling slowly upwards, inch by inch until his gaze was pointed a foot above Richie's head.

"You're unbelievable." Eddie said flatly as Richie handed him the balloon - neon yellow and slowly rotating on the string above him, stamped in black letters with 'I ❤ Derry' - and he didn't know why he took it or why he held it but he did and he just stared at him, unimpressed, and Richie stared back through his aviator sunglasses, "You look like Joaquin Phoenix when he was having a mid-life crisis."

"That was a bit." Richie pointed out; he was wearing that awful fucking shirt again and Eddie realized it was even looser on him than it had been a couple weeks ago and suddenly he felt like he'd taken something from Tozier in order to heal, like he had leeched his health from him and Richie had given it willingly.

He didn't know what to do with the thought, he just knew that it made him uncomfortable and itchy and he scratched again at his chest until Richie spoke:

"You trying to dig a hole in there again?"

"No." Eddie said, childishly defensive.

"Could turn you into a sock puppet if you do, you can be part of my act." he said.

"I could put my fist up your ass and we could do it that way, too."

"You've got a thing about putting your limbs in my ass, I'm noticing." Richie said, and Eddie opened his mouth, "It's fine, I'm not kink-shaming, I'm not gonna yuck your yum, Spaghetti, you don't have to explain it to me."

"Shut up." Eddie pouted and then they both looked out at the empty parking lot, at the street lights, at the park even further out and the red and blue distant statue of Paul Bunyan.

"I know it's late," Richie began.

"If we don't take any breaks, we can get two hundred miles from here in four hours." Eddie said quickly and they both jogged for the car, the balloon releasing into the night sky and drifting off with the sharp breeze.

They were quiet until they passed the sign, like they had both been holding their breath, and they stayed quiet as they watched it in the rear view mirror, watched as it turned into a distant green speck and then it was gone.

Richie pulled the car over.

"This is not two hundred miles, Tozier." Eddie began, then heard his own jaw click shut as Richie Tozier dropped his face into his hands and began to weep, and Eddie had seen a lot of horrible things in his life, but it occurred to him that this made it into the top ten, moving into the top five when Richie became audible, choking on his own tears, the sound of a man who had no idea how to cry but was going full steam ahead with it anyways, confused by his own emotions.

Eddie didn't know what to do; he wondered if he should poke him with his foot, or slap him in the side of the head, or honk the car horn, or do something, anything to make him stop making that noise, and then he discovered his arms were around Richie and he was collapsing against him, clinging to him and sobbing so hysterically that Eddie started to worry they needed to go back to the hospital.

"Hey, don't puke on me again." Eddie said over the sound of his hiccups.

"Fuck you." Richie wailed, half-laughing.

"It's okay." Eddie said finally, because he didn't know what else to do, what else to say, because he knew there was nothing that was enough, so he clasped the back of Richie's neck and let him cry until he was done, and then they didn't talk about it afterwards.

* * *

They could have gotten separate rooms but they didn't.

Halfway to New York, the pain got too bad for Eddie to sit any longer, his chest and back throbbing fiercely from the hard press of the car seat and when he pulled over at a motel with a crackling sign, Eddie complained until Richie turned the engine again and they found somewhere better.

"I thought you were in pain," Richie shot back.

"Not in so much pain that I'm going to risk scabies."

"What the fuck are scabies?"

"They're insects, they're bugs, they burrow under your skin and shit in there and then it turns into pustules -"

"They give you _shit pimples_?" Richie asked, looking over at him, then back to the road.

"- yeah, they're fucking disgusting, and that's why you shouldn't stay in shitty fucking motels, Tozier, that and someone's going to probably cut your throat and stuff you in a mattress in one of those places."

"What the fuck." Richie said and kept driving.

They ended up in a three star just as the sun was coming up and took a room with two beds and Eddie collapsed into the nearest one. He woke up to Richie carefully taking his shoes off for him, then again when he was draping him with a blanket, and once more when Richie pushed a glass of water into his hands with his medication, which put him out for another six hours.

He dragged himself into the bathroom and took the longest piss he'd ever taken in his life and then looked at himself in the mirror while he washed his hands, staring into his own face where it had become just a little thinner, a lot paler. He needed to exfoliate, he needed to moisturize, he needed to get his eyebrows done and he needed his hair trimmed, he needed to do a lot of things to get halfway to feeling human again.

When he stepped back into the room, a complete stranger walked in through the door, glanced at the empty bed, then said:

"Hey, I got -"

"What the fuck?" Eddie asked, and then his face morphed as he realized it was Richie, his beard gone, his hair cut conservatively short but already fighting the way it had been neatly brushed, turning into waves and spirals, "Holy shit."

"What?" Richie asked, startled, leaning away, "What? I got sandwiches!"

He half-yelled the last part.

"You look so fucking good." Eddie said and Richie stared at him with such abject terror that he glanced behind himself to make sure nothing was there before looking at him again, reaching up for Richie's hair and for a moment he thought he was going to pull away from him, but he stayed instead, even leaned forward a little to let him do it.

"They did it a lot shorter than -" he began.

"It looks good." Eddie interrupted, combing his fingers through it a couple times and he said out loud, "Soft."

"Soft." Richie repeated, mocking his voice.

"Fuck you." Eddie said and Richie didn't say it back, he just stared at him, still leaning in with Eddie's fingers in his hair and they just stood like that for far too long, searching each others' gazes, mutual confusion about what was happening, and then he remembered when he had first woken up, he remembered the strange desperation in Richie's voice, the discomfort because he wasn't saying it back.

Why wasn't Richie saying it back?

"Hey," Eddie began, and then Richie covered his mouth with his hand, then leaned in and kissed the back of his own hand, an act that was strange and warming and confusing, and then Richie patted him hard on the side of the face.

"Come on, crab-sack, you need to eat something." Richie said, wheeling away from the moment, away from the nearness, away from him, and setting the bag down.

"Richie." Eddie said, and watched Richie's shoulders slouch, the understanding that he wasn't allowed to just walk away from it, "You've got to tell me, man. Whatever it is - I know there's something, you've got to just say it."

Richie didn't speak or move, so Eddie came forward, stood there for a while mulling over the possibilities.

"Is it the deadlights?" he asked finally, filled suddenly and completely with the horror of Richie with his body in puppet laxity, dangling in the air and dead to reality, his eyes rolled back until just the whites were showing, a terrifying spectre of himself. It made him feel sick.

Richie nodded; he was still trying to unpack the bag, so he put a hand on his wrist.

"You saw something in them?" Eddie asked, watching Richie watching their hands, his expression stunned. He nodded again, "What did you see?"

Richie struggled for a while, then he finally said:

"This."

They met eyes.

"This?" Eddie repeated, "What, this, right now?"

Richie nodded.

"Word for word?" Eddie asked, and Richie nodded, and the confirmation made him feel a touch hysterical, like he might laugh or cry at any moment, both hoping that Richie was fucking with him and angry at the idea that he might be, so he blurted out, "If you don't get rid of that bikini girl shirt, I'm going to burn it."

Except Richie said it too, at the same time, so Eddie let out a small, high-pitched whine, his brows knit together.

"I don't like this."

"Yeah, well, you think I do?" Richie asked, brows raising, pointing to his own chest, "Because I have to deal with knowing the next part."

"Do I want to know the next part?"

Richie opened his mouth for a moment, shook his head while he did, the expression of someone stuck on their own words.

"I feel like there's not a lot of choice right now, I've already seen it happen."

"What happens?"

"We talk."

"Did this part happen too?"

"Yes."

"And this part?"

Richie flopped his arms; they felt strange and limp.

"Yeah." he said, exasperated. "This is the part where I'm supposed to tell you that I

Richie's legs gave out as he hit the ground, temporarily blinded by the deadlights, his fingers scrabbling against wet rock while Eddie tumbled backwards into the darkness.

**Author's Note:**

> I am a little bit sorry.
> 
> Yell at me on twitter @BoWritesShit


End file.
